87 quotes
All truth is ancient. The enticement of novelty lies only in its expressive variations. The greater the contrast in outward appearance, the greater the joy of recognition.
Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.
Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Love works magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
A king born is better than one made. The best person will not be able to endure such an elevation without changing. Those who are born to it do not falter nor are they overwhelmed by such a position.
Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
The possibility of all philosophy ... namely, that the intelligence, by affecting itself, gives itself a movement in accordance with its own law — that is, gives itself a form of activity all its own.
Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body....
The highest life is mathematics.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Light became their favorite subject on account of its mathematical obediance and freedom of movement. They were more interested in the play of its colors, and thus they named after it their great enterprise, the Enlightenment.
Christendom or Europe (1799)
The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.
The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.
Attributed
To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.
Attributed